Plastic pollution in the ocean is a huge, huge problem. But microplastics has become an even bigger problem because of the sheer size and the size of the surface area of the toxins that are on these microplastics. And they get into everything. There have been scientific reports that said, hey, you know what? Microplastics are even in air molecules, in sea salt. It's just everywhere. They're getting into
our lungs. They're getting into our system. It's affecting our health overall. There is a global plastic treaty that has just wrapped up its fourth meeting to see if we could actually get agreement internationally to ban certain types of plastics and have a plan internationally to get rid of these plastics that are not only polluting our ocean but polluting
our bodies. And today we're going to be talking about ways to actually extract microplastics from the ocean and will they actually work that's the one question that we always have we had another company a while ago the ocean cleanup that said hey we can actually clean up all the ocean plastics in the pacific gyre that still hasn't happened yet and they're still working on and they've basically just come up with a with a method of fishing which isn't really helping and
won't really help in the long term but people are putting loads and loads of money because this is a problem that we have to solve whether it's the right thing to do or the right way of doing it or not people are trying to figure out ways to solve it there's a new article in IFL science that I want to cover today which looks at how to bind with microplastics certain I guess certain I guess chemicals I guess you call or materials like I believe it's Chitin as well as the cotton materials in
cotton to be able to absorb and bind So it's gonna be an interesting topic to talk about on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast Let's start the show Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lo and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean and what you can do to live for a better ocean by
taking action. And today we're going to be talking about microplastics, something that is really interesting. I've been talking about for a long time in terms of ocean plastic pollution and microplastics and how it affects the environment, our environment. our bodies, it is
crazy. And if you wanna find out more information on the ocean and plastic, you can go to our website, speakupforblue.com, find out all the information you need, episodes that we've done in the past, whether it's video, whether it's audio, there's always something for you to listen to or watch and also read. There's all material on that podcast, including other podcasts. It's all on the website, speakupforblue.com. And if you wanna get information to your inbox, and Monday to
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all that information on the ocean. The reason why I'm doing this is really to bring you information, like act as a resource to bring you information on ocean conservation, not just ocean education, you know, talking about wildlife and all that. There's a lot of people who do that. The goal for me is really to bring conservation to you. and the little things that people are doing, especially from a solution standpoint, things like projects, things that
people are doing, they're trying to undertake. Some things may work out, some things may not work out, but it's always good to talk about them and to build on them, because that's science, right? We build on things, we criticize things, we build on things, and hopefully we can get to something that's really great. And in this case, you know, we're talking about a topic that I don't know a lot in terms of like engineering our
way and innovating our way to get to ocean solutions. I am not an engineer, I am not a chemist, but today we're going to be talking about materials that can help bind microplastics to help them get absorbed out of the ocean and into a proper way of disposing of them, if there really is a proper way of disposing of them. There's a lot of problems with plastics. The first is the amount of plastics that
we use in our daily life. With all these solutions that I'm proposing, and people who are professionals in the plastic conservation and reduction, they're gonna say the first thing we gotta do is refuse to use single-use plastics. Refuse to use plastics at all times. And that includes in our clothes, that includes in our food or containers, that includes in our drinking bottles. It's just a number of things. It includes pretty much And
just to let you know, plastics is a petroleum product. It is a product that is made from fossil fuels, from petroleum, and is made into materials that we use. A lot of that is not disposed of properly, and the chemicals could leach out and cause problems to our own bodies, problems to animal bodies. and problems to the environment in general. So nasty chemicals made up from those, that make up those products, and so we need to
stop using them in the first place. That's the first way to really put a dent in the amount of microplastics and plastics that get into the ocean. The second thing is we have to look at how to actually extract microplastics from the ocean and the first thing to do is get it where it starts to enter and
that is into the river systems. Now there are places like four oceans and other places that go around and clean up plastics whether they're large plastics or microplastics they do their best to get as much as possible and they make materials from that and they do their best to remake those materials or reuse those materials So when you can't refuse, you reuse as much as possible and you remake them into something that's inspiring to help them do their
business. So 4Ocean, I did an interview with Alex Schultz, you can check it out up here and you can find out how that company works and what they're doing. Again, we still have to stop using microplastics and plastics in general. But companies like 4Ocean really
do a great job in helping us get their stuff out. And they work along riversides and river mouths to try and make sure that the entrance into the ocean before it gets into this vast, vast ocean that covers over 70% of the planet, they work
at getting those plastics out before they can break down into microplastics. and that's essentially what happens right when it goes into the ocean it hits the sun it hits the salt water the plastic breaks down with the wave action and just getting pushed all over the place sometimes sinking down it breaks down into smaller pieces of plastics called microplastics it has a larger surface area because it's so small and the chemicals leach
out into the ocean or into the animal that is ingested by and it gets into their system and it can eventually kill them if it builds up enough. We wanna stay away from that as much as possible. But how do we actually extract it out when it gets into such a big area? It's very difficult to do. But there is a method that this article in IFLScience is covering, and I'm gonna link to it in the show notes and in the description below, but
it's really cool. It talks about using the absorption power of cotton and the ability to bind, like chitin, from squid to say, hey, you know what, we can actually absorb these materials. It's a really, really interesting way of looking at it. It's a solution that's eco-friendly, and it borrows from the secrets of soaking up skills from cotton and, of course, squid, which is a really a very different way of
looking at it. And so because microplastics are such a difficult problem, it looks like the sponge-like foam that borrows the soaking skills of cotton and squid may be a promising candidate, as it was found to remove 98 to 99.9% of microplastics from water samples that were studied. Now, of course, these are just water samples. This is not the entire ocean. So on a scale that big,
we just don't know how to do that. But maybe we can figure out ways, like I said, getting into the mouths of rivers or even sooner than that to get microplastics before they get into the ocean. So what's more, the foam is sustainable and environmentally adaptable without carrying the Newstown Zone destroying risk of ocean hovering
approaches. This is referring to the Ocean Cleanup Project. And when you first looked at the first model of the Ocean Cleanup, project was essentially this automatic boat that had these large boom arms that would go out and they would just try to corral everything into the middle into sort of this
like a net like material. They would take everything at the surface or really the top I believe it was three meters at the time or maybe three feet I think I believe it was three meters at the time so I had to net that that below. When they first rolled it out, they said, hey, it's not going to harm animals at all because it moves so slowly that animals can get out. There's these animals, invertebrates called newstins, and they can't get
out of the way. And so one of the major criticisms when they started showing pictures from this boom arm mechanism working, Dr. Rebecca Helm was one of the scientists that looked at the pictures and started identifying animals that were in these boom arms and saying, hey, you know what? You are actually hurting animals. We can
see it right there. these animals are important to the environment and into the ocean environment and removing them without having someone there to try and get them out is just not a feasible way of doing things when you really look at it. So you are harming animals which is said it didn't it did an environmental assessment quote-unquote. And it said it didn't do any harm to animals, but obviously it did. So that was
referring to that. Also while targeting microplastics already in the environment, it could use to treat water at factories before it gets released. So that's even more interesting. So any kind of plastics that are in the water that before it goes out into the river systems can also work. So working to both reduce the microplastics already in nature and those being leaked into
it. So this has a lot of upside here so far. One of the authors said, microplastics entering terrestrial and aquatic habitats are anticipated to continuously increase for thousands of years due to the alarming volumes of plastic waste in the environment, around 4.5 billion metric tons, and the difficulty of degrading under natural conditions. So that's one of the quotes. So it goes on to say, the planet is under great threat from microplastics and
aquatic ecosystems are the first to suffer. As they provide convenient places for microplastics, which can combine with other contaminants and it be ingested by multiple levels of organisms. The development of a widely adaptive approaches for microplastic remediation in aqueous environments is urgently demanded. Now there is a really interesting graphic on here, so I highly recommend that you go to the thing. I'll pop it up in the video here in terms of how it actually binds
using cotton and the chitin from squid. These
materials are easily replicable, which is great. So essentially what happens is it makes this sort of this homogenized material you know without crossing it and then it goes into then again i'm not a chemist but essentially it goes into this this fibrous foam and then it it binds to the microplastic and those kind of stay in those interactions which is really great now it can be reused which is also nice to know i don't know what this would look like like it doesn't give
a good concept of what it would look like when it's being deployed into water, like what this material would look like, or if it's just chemicals and then all of a sudden it comes in and it binds, I have no idea what it's supposed to look like. This is fairly new, and so I think it's something that we'd have to look into, but I don't know what it actually looks like. But to address the demand, they create a sponge-like substance called CT cell biomass, a foam that
combines two substances found in nature. Cellulose from cotton and chitin from squid are famously squishy, but inside their soft tissues is a small pen-shaped skeleton made of chitin. So the two substances stuck together nicely when the team broke out their original hydrogen bonds and induced intermolecular interactions of cellulose and chitin, creating a stable framework with loads of activated hydrogen bonding sites
for microplastics absorption. So that's how it gets, essentially they bind together, you strip the hydrogen bonds from them, they bind together and then they form these other hydrogen bonds that that bind to the microplastics. So by running absorption tests as well as computational studies, they observed that it could capture microplastics in several ways, physical interception, electrostatic attraction, as well
as multiple intermolecular interactions. Essentially, this thing's going to be sticky, is really what it sounds like, and there's multiple ways for it to connect, which I think is really interesting. The CT to foam has great potential to be used in the extraction of microplastic from complex water bodies. Thus, our design principles would facilitate the future development of practical and sustainable strategies based on biomass foams to address microplastic pollution. I want to
temper this a little bit. this is a really interesting interesting study this is something that i feel like has potential i don't know all the ins and outs of this project so please don't say that andrew approves of this project there's going to be a lot of testing that happens and how do you do it at scale there is like when i tell you there are microplastics in the ocean i can't tell you enough how large of a distribution,
these microplastics are. They have been found. Plastics have been found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It's the deepest part of the ocean that we've been to. It is everywhere. So to be able to say, hey, we can innovate our way out of this just by using this method, no. This is part of, this is a tool in the conservation tool belt, as I like to say. The biggest thing that we need to do is remove these
plastics, these microplastics, by not using them. Refusing to use plastics and especially when it comes to different ways Like we we use plastics when it comes becomes convenient to use plastics. We use them in our you know, drinking drinks we you know people when we buy from coffee shops when we buy a convenience stores like energy drinks and Vitamin waters and Gatorades and things like that. They come in plastic bottles. These are all bad for us and the environment They're not necessary. We
used to sell things in glass bottles, but those are too heavy for transportation. So it costs a lot more This is more for the cost of the company to say, hey, it's actually cheaper to ship all these. We can get these out more and more. Soda bottles and things like that, plastic bottles, not good for us. But when I say from an individual level, we talk a lot, and a lot of people say, well, you have to stop. You have to do this. You have to do this. We
are in a system that's built on plastic. And so what we need to do is really talk to our government representatives and that might be harder these days than in some places than it was before but microplastics need to be phased out that's why international agreements like the global plastic treaty is such an important part of our lives or will be such an important lives in the future hoping that this last meeting in south korea went better
than the one in Ottawa and hopefully there's something that's going to be drawn up shortly and be ratified by a number of governments around the world so that we can see more plastic action. I'm very happy to say that the Canadian government has taken action and has become a leader in this field, but it's still new and there's still lots of work to be done and it's being met with a lot of challenges and a lot of restrictions and resistance and I think we need
to fight a little bit more. And that comes from the people, that comes from the people Motivating the government to say hey, we need something to be done about this because this is not good for us I know it makes money for a lot of the companies, but it's not good for us And we need to really look out for our own health. So that's what I'm gonna talk about for today I thought this article was interesting. I haven't covered in a while something on IFL science So I highly
recommend that you check out the site. I'm not being sponsored by them by any means I'm just I just like the site. I like I like getting the the emails and the broadcast channels on Facebook and Instagram and be able to get that information to you. So I'll probably be covering more of their articles. But I want to thank the Eiffel Science. I want to thank the writer, Rachel
Funnell. And also I want to thank you for listening to this episode. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode and this topic of mycoplastics. Let me know. Just hit me up on Instagram at howtoprotecttheocean. And of course, if you want to Join us more and get more of our of our episodes. You can subscribe to us on YouTube and click that notification bill so you don't miss any of our new episodes Monday, Wednesday and Friday, as well as you can subscribe to us on and follow us on
Apple podcasts, on Spotify, on your favorite podcasting app. We are there all the time. So feel free to comment where you can hit me up on on Instagram and at how to protect the ocean. And again, I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. I am your host Angelo and have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and